Tag: taxes

Thomas Frank knows about Republicans and populism.

There certainly has been a lot of syllables expended on what organizers were billing as “largest grass-roots demonstration in history,” but instead turned out to be, well, a lot of hot air.

Yes, there were numerous demonstrations, some with more than 1,000 people, according to The Associated Press, but these paled in comparison to the protests leading up to the Iraq War or even the antiglobalization protests in Seattle during the tail-end of the Clinton era.

From the AP:

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — Thousands of protesters, some dressed like Revolutionary War soldiers and most waving signs with anti-tax slogans, gathered around the nation Wednesday for a series of rallies modeled after the original Boston Tea Party. They chose the income tax filing deadline to express their displeasure with government spending since President Barack Obama took office.

The protests were held everywhere from Kentucky, which just passed tax increases on cigarettes and alcohol, to South Carolina, where the governor has repeatedly criticized the $787 billion economic stimulus package Congress passed earlier this year.

”Frankly, I’m mad as hell,” said Des Moines, Iowa, businessman Doug Burnett, one of about 1,000 people, many in red shirts declaring ”revolution is brewing,” at a rally at the Iowa Capitol. ”This country has been on a spending spree for decades, a spending spree we can’t afford.”

The biggest reported in the AP story? 3,000 in Connecticut. Contrast this with the protests in February 2003 against the impending invasion of Iraq, from The New York Times:

On a wintry day in New York, huge crowds, prohibited by a court order from marching, rallied within sight of the United Nations amid heavy security. They raised banners of patriotism and dissent, sounded the hymns of a broad new antiwar movement and heard speakers denounce what they called President Bush’s rush to war, while offering no sympathy for Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein.

“The World Says No to War,” proclaimed a huge banner over a stage on First Avenue near 51st Street, the focal point of crowds that filled the avenue from 49th Street to 72nd Street and spilled over into side streets and to Second, Third and Lexington Avenues, where thousands more were halted at police barricades, far from the sights and sounds of the demonstration.

Crowd estimates are often little more than politically tinged guesses. The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, put the crowd at about 100,000, while the organizers said 400,000 people attended. Given the sea of faces extending more than a mile up First Avenue and the ancillary crowds that were prevented from joining them, it seemed that something in between was probable.

There were similar though smaller demonstrations in Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, San Diego, Sacramento, Miami, Detroit, Milwaukee and scores of other American cities, organized under the umbrella of United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of 120 organizations.

I’ll leave it at that.

Back at the office for this last post from our meeting with Gov. Jon Corzine, a meeting that focused primarily on the state budget and the efforts being made by the administration to deal with falling revenues.

Fred Tuccillo, editor of The Princeton Packet, raised a question about school funding and the income tax, asking whether moving from property taxes to something else to fund schools would need to happen at some point.

That seems to me to make the most sense, but the governor said “it might be prohibitive to do that” because much of the cost of that change is likely to fall on the middle class. He said that about 40 percent of all income taxes collected in New Jersey already comes from the top 2 percent of taxpayers, meaning that it would be “very hard to do taht without changing the tax rates that middle-class people pay.”

He acknowledges the regressive nature of the property tax, saying that his commitment to rebates for lower- and middle-class New Jerseyans was designed to “lean agaisnt the regressivity of the property tax system.”

His argument, essentially, was that the increase in income taxes that the change would create for middle-income folks would be a hardship for them and not be politically pallatable.

But you have to wonder whether the decrease in property tax bills would offset the increased income taxes, as seems likely. If, as everyone says, about two thirds of local property taxes go to schools, then moderate to middle-income homeowners could save somewhere in the neighborhood of $4,000 to $6,000 in property taxes, if not more. How much would the shift to income taxes cost the same household?